List as entire house or private room?

1

Hi Everyone!

Need a bit of hand-holding here…

I have two bedrooms in my basement (full-size windows, very nice) with a (soon-to-be) full private bath and small kitchenette.

I do not want to - and refuse to - list the rooms separately. My mission is to provide comfortable, budget lodging for families like mine or groups of up to 5. If the group is 3 they get one room with 2 beds; bookings for more than 3 guests also get the second room with a queen size futon.

The problem is that, on the air website, if it’s a room (not entire house) you can only list it as having 1 bedroom. When searching listings the number of bedrooms and beds is right at the top. So my listing would show “1 bedroom, 5 people, 3 beds”. It would appear, without reading further, that all 5 people would be mashed into one room. I was shopping for a place for our family of 5 recently, and if the listing had only 1 bedroom I dismissed it immediately - entire house or shared.

So I changed my listing to ‘entire house’ and changed my title to “2 Comfy Rooms in Shared Home” and my ‘about this listing’ says “Welcome! We offer two rooms, 1 bath in the lower level of our home. Room #1 is sunny with queen airbed and 1 twin. Room #2 is cozy with queen futon. 2nd bath upstairs. Kitchenette. Breakfast. Parking. Convenient to metro, UMD, market, restaurants” My description says “Welcome! This is a shared home - we live on the top floor, you will have the lower level with two rooms, a full bath, and a small kitchen area. You are also welcome to use the upstairs bathroom. We are a 5 minute walk to the F4 bus stop and a 20 minute train-ride into DC.”

At what point can I call it a ‘suite’. I don’t think it will ever have a private entrance because then the guest would have to traipse around the backyard, getting muddy, and it’s dark, and besides, we enjoy seeing our guests. (Just today we had a family who ran in the Marine Corps Marathon and it was so fun hearing about their experience).

All that for $55 for 2, $10 each additional person. (Actually I will raise my price once we get the full bathroom in.

I don’t want to mislead anyone but I want groups/families to see immediately that they will have two separate sleeping areas. Important for mixed gender families/groups. Also just so much nicer with 4 or 5 people to have a little separation!!

Thoughts? Should I just call it a ‘suite’? There is a student that also shares that space. We’d really like to ask her to move out - we thought she would move in with her boyfriend and problem solved - now they have just broken up and aurgh it’s hard to ask her to move now!!!

Thanks Everyone!!

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I can’t list it as a suite, I don’t think, because we still occasionally go down there - we have a fridge that we store stuff in, etc…

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Welllllll I think I’ve answered my own question. Thanks to everyone who is so active on this listing - just knowing I had someone with experience to ask helped me think it through.

I listed it as private bedroom. The listing will show ‘1 bedroom’ but my title says “2 Comfy Bedrooms, 1.5 baths, More!” so they will see upfront that there are 2 bedrooms, and it reiterates it all in my listing. Several times. ; ) Selecting ‘entire’, ‘private’ or ‘share’ actually takes more work, it’s not a required field.

Phew. ; )

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Sorry I cant be much help as we only Air our spare room in our two bed flat! Glad you worked it out :grinning:

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I rent my whole home, and I had single listing rooms (2) inside that same home. I took the single rooms down as we were doing so well renting the whole home. People wont sleep in beds they don’t need. I think where you run into difficulty with whole home is no separate entrance. When people rent the whole home, they have expectation of privacy that individual room bookers don’t. I would call it a suite as that by way of the language indicates that it is within a larger area. Perhaps the language could say private suite with kitchen in large home. Shared entrance.

I have a private suite I also rent on the same property that is adjoining my main listing. I use it when I am in residence and rent it when I am out. I call it a suite with private entrance and efficiency kitchen. I have added to both listings that they are within one building and the guests may hear ambient noise from the other side of the home. If they don’t like that then this may not be the right booking for you.

Hope that helps

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6

I also have two rooms and a bathroom upstairs that I rent out to guests, that I list as one whole room. I also refuse to list out the rooms separately.

I think most people interpret “entire home” as the host not living on the property. If you live on the property where you rent this suite out, you may still want to list it as “private room”, that way travelers know you occupy the property.

On my listing description I made it clear that the two upstairs bedrooms and the one bathroom are treated as one whole room. I know not many travelers would be willing to share a bathroom with other strangers (and i’ve heard quite a few horror stories)

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7

Kasage two of our guest rooms share a bathroom. In all honesty this is the least of our problems as hosts on Airbnb. Sure some guests are totally inconsiderate (actually many, or most), necessitating that one of us try to go in and clean between guests or whoever we can to prevent each other seeing the toothpaste spat down the side of the tub, clumps of hair and conditioner not rinsed down, pubic hair all the way up to the ceiling, huge boogers, and worst of all, enormous slugs of snot before the other guests experience it. Otherwise, not a problem yet in three years.

As for everything else Airbnb - inconsiderate guests, guests that don’t follow rules i.e. 99% of them, make up staining slobby behavior and a whole bunch of other upsetting stuff that has caused us to need a break, um there’s lots of that.